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Campbell, Samuel

by Carole Watterson Troxler, 1979

d. ca. 1790

Samuel Campbell, Loyalist militia colonel, was a native of North Carolina and a Wilmington merchant in partnership with Robert Hogg. In 1771 he embodied and led a company against the Regulators at Alamance. He raised a group of loyal militia from Wilmington for the Moore's Creek Bridge campaign and suffered some harassment from the committee of safety after their defeat. Campbell took the state oath of allegiance but avoided militia service by moving to the country and hiring a substitute. When the British forces reached Wilmington in 1781, he joined them as a militia captain and accompanied them on the evacuation to Charles Town. There he was colonel commandant of the North Carolina loyal militia and as such was the highest ranking refugee in the evacuation of the British forces from Charles Town to Nova Scotia. By May 1783 he was in Shelburne, Nova Scotia, with his family and several slaves. Campbell's wife, Alice, was Robert Hogg's widow; their son, Samuel, was born in Shelburne in 1788. Campbell received a warehouse lot and a wharf lot in Shelburne and fifty acres nearby, but he did not prosper. He received some money from Hogg's brother in Wilmington, who had managed to retain some of their property.

Apparently Campbell died in Shelburne, for his widow was living there in 1792, when she married Colin Campbell, a prominent lawyer who had gone from Scotland to New York at the beginning of the war. Samuel Campbell, Jr., became a justice of the peace and from 1820 through 1826 was a member of the Nova Scotia Legislative Assembly from Annapolis County.

Public Archives of Canada, British Headquarters Papers, No. 5951 (Ottawa), Public Archives of Nova Scotia, A Directory of the Members of the Legislative Assembly of Nova Scotia (1958).

P.R.O., A.O. 13:138.

ibid., T. 50:1 and 5.

Additional Resources:

"Memorial from James Tate et al. concerning the confiscation of property." Colonial and State Records of North Carolina vol. 15. 203-205. Documenting the American South, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. http://docsouth.unc.edu/csr/index.html/document/csr15-0151 (accessed December 20, 2013).

"Minutes of the Wilmington Committee of Safety October 25, 1775 - October 30, 1775." Colonial and State Records of North Carolina vol. 10. 298-299. Documenting the American South, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. http://docsouth.unc.edu/csr/index.html/document/csr10-0121 (accessed December 20, 2013).